In a stunning escalation of its campaign to secure top-tier artificial intelligence talent, Meta is hiring Daniel Gross, the CEO of the $32 billion startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), along with his partner and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The move, reported by CNBC, represents a sharp tactical pivot after Meta’s earlier attempt to acquire the high-profile research firm was personally rebuffed by its legendary co-founder, Ilya Sutskever.
Unable to buy the company or recruit its chief scientist, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has settled for the next best thing: hiring away its business leadership. As part of a multi-year deal with significant stock-based compensation, according to The Information, Meta will also acquire a stake in Gross and Friedman’s venture capital firm, NFDG. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the company would share more details on its superintelligence efforts in the coming weeks.
This aggressive “acqui-hire” is the latest in a multi-billion-dollar spending spree designed to bolster Meta’s AI division amid an intensifying talent war and reports of internal development struggles. It follows the company’s recent and controversial $14.3 billion investment to bring on Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, signaling that Meta is willing to pay any price to acquire the human capital it deems essential for its future.
Silicon Valley’s Billion-Dollar Arms Race for Talent
The battle for elite AI minds has reached a fever pitch, with multi-billion dollar deals becoming the new standard for acquiring talent. Microsoft set the stage with its $650 million deal to absorb most of the team from AI startup Inflection. Meanwhile, OpenAI spent an estimated $6.5 billion to bring on famed designer Jony Ive and his nascent startup. These transactions highlight a market where a handful of key individuals are valued as highly as entire companies.
The competition is particularly fierce between Meta and its rivals. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently accused Meta of attempting to lure his developers with signing bonuses as high as $100 million. Speaking on a recent podcast, Altman remarked, “I’ve heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor. Their current AI efforts have not worked as well as they have hoped and I respect being aggressive and continuing to try new things.”
Meta’s audacious moves have captured the attention of investors, with some retail investor sentiment framing the strategy as bullish.
The $32 Billion Startup at the Center of the Storm
Safe Superintelligence, the company at the heart of Meta’s latest maneuver, has experienced a meteoric rise since its founding in June 2024. Established by Sutskever, Gross, and former OpenAI scientist Daniel Levy, SSI’s stated mission is to move beyond the current paradigm of simply scaling up models, a resource-intensive approach Sutskever believes is hitting a wall. “We’ve reached peak data. There’s only one internet.”, he said at the NeurIPS 2024 conference.
The startup’s vision quickly attracted massive investment. After an initial $1 billion funding round valued it at approximately $5 billion in September 2024, SSI’s valuation skyrocketed. By April 2025, a new $2 billion investment that included tech giants Alphabet and Nvidia pushed its valuation to an astounding $32 billion. As part of its growth, SSI also forged a key partnership to use Google Cloud’s specialized Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for its research.
Even with the departure of its CEO to Meta, SSI’s core mission appears set to continue. Reports from The Information suggest that co-founder Ilya Sutskever is expected to remain at the company to lead its fundamental research, creating a separation between the firm’s business and scientific leadership.
A Strategy Forged in Crisis
Meta’s aggressive external strategy appears to be a direct response to significant internal challenges. The company has been battling a severe talent drain, having lost 11 of the 14 original authors of its foundational Llama research paper. This exodus was compounded by the significant postponement of its most ambitious model, Llama 4 “Behemoth”, and internal reports of a “panic mode” among AI teams.
The company’s $14 billion investment in Scale AI, intended to be a strategic coup, quickly ignited a crisis for its new partner. The deal compromised Scale’s perceived neutrality, a critical asset for a data-labeling firm serving multiple AI labs. The fallout was immediate with Google, Scale’s largest customer, planning to sever ties. The situation led Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth to declare that for leading AI labs, neutrality is “no longer optional, it’s essential.”
However, some analysts view Meta’s spending not merely as a panicked reaction but as a calculated, long-term play. According to analysis from Stratechery, Meta is making a “strategic play to create a powerful, independent AI ecosystem that isn’t beholden to a cloud provider’s existing business model.”
This perspective reframes Meta’s actions as a deliberate, albeit costly, effort to carve out its own defensible territory in the AI landscape. The hiring of Gross and Friedman, seen through this lens, is another critical step in assembling the leadership team Meta believes it needs to build that future, a future it was unable to simply buy.
